The agony of Wilmer Flores

No, I won’t suggest that what happened in Flushing Meadows Wednesday night was a good thing.

What I will suggest is that it might not have been as awful as you’d think, just from Twitter. And that given a bit of time, it will come to seem even less awful.

Well, first thing. Just in case you missed it, everybody in the ballpark thought Wilmer Flores was playing his last game as a Met … and yet he just kept playing, almost until the end. Which was rough on him:

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Almost nobody looks good here. I won’t even run through the list of people and classes of people who don’t look good; instead I’ll just say that Wilmer Flores must be listed among the blameless few. And yet he was the one out there on the field, doing his best to keep it together in a game that counted.

What I came here to say, though? There’s nothing wrong with showing emotions to the world. No shame in this. And it’s possible that Flores will actually come to appreciate the moment when he couldn’t help showing how he felt about the New York Mets, and when their fans gave him a rousing ovation.

These moments don’t come along very often. For some of us, maybe most of us, they never come along at all. But I can tell you that when they do come, later you might well remember them fondly.

So let’s give this one some time. In a few weeks or months or years, someone with some sensitivity will ask Wilmer Flores what that felt like, taking the field when he thought he’d been traded by the only team he’d ever known. Then let’s see what he says.